Guillaume Nicloux: “Colonization makes the reconstruction of a country very difficult”

Votes

In Les confins du monde Guillaume Nicloux outlines a stark portrait of the insanity of the Indochina war in 1940s.

The director Guillaume Nicloux and the actor Gaspard Ulliel visited FICX56 to present this film that competed in the Official Section.

For the filming of Les confins du monde, the team traveled to Vietnam, where they spent four weeks living “a very strong human experience”, in which “the personal facet and the film were nurturing each other.” Gaspard Ulliel denied having felt “the wounds of the war were exacerbated” there, although he noticed some distance with the local people, softened by the work of Nicloux, always “against the tide” of any colonizing notion. In the director’s opinion, “colonization makes very difficult for a country to rebuild itself”, and particularly in the French case "nowadays one can be more critical of what happened". In this regard, he underlined the mistakes made by France after being the object of the German occupation, “not only in Indochina, but also in Algeria.” “Those who fight for independence in those countries have to go through hell to achieve freedom.”

As for his referents, Nicloux claims to not have based this work on Apocalypse Now or on other artistic works based “more on human conflict than on the armed one”, because he was looking for “something more authentic and less spectacular”, about the “soldiers’ fear of confrontation.” On this subject, he mentioned the novel The Tartar Steppe (Il deserto dei Tartari) by Dino Buzzati and the film La 317ème section (Pierre Schoendoerffer, 1965) as references with “soldiers who are waiting without hardly seeing the enemy”; although he does not deny having also been inspired by Goya's macabre paintings to show “the fascination with horror.” In Les confins du monde there are plenty of mutilated bodies and corpses, with which the filmmaker wanted to expose “frontally and in a very raw way” that “after death, a body is something very banal, a lot of flesh and bones.”

For Ulliel, working with Nicloux was a process different from everything he had known before, because as a director he is guided by “the flash of the moment”, opening his films to the possible directions that can be taken while they are in motion. After the presentation of Les confins du monde in Cannes and Karlovy Vary, the French filmmaker was gladly satisfied during his visit to FICX56 because “Gijón is a very beautiful city, and that changes the way you see a film.”